Becoming Tinkerbell

In all the bustle of getting ready for Halloween and the kids' vacation with their grandparents, I'd completely forgotten that I'd actually snapped a few photos of Syd's design and construction process for her Tinkerbell outfit.

I didn't take a photo of what, to me, was the cutest moment: Syd watching a Tinkerbell movie, sketchbook and colored pencils around her, and pausing it every time Tinkerbell demonstrated a new pose that showed off a different aspect of her outfit. Syd recorded everything from Tinkerbell's hairdo to her pom-pom shoes in her sketchbook.

Thankfully, I had felt of an acceptable color in my fabric stash. I REALLY don't want to buy new fabric until I've used up the old, but I'm also putty-like in the face of a child's artistic determination, so I'm glad that I didn't even have to think about fighting that internal battle. I took Syd's measurements at her chest and from chest to knee, showed her how to transfer the measurements to graph paper, and here she is working out the bottom width of her garment:

Syd then sewed the side seams and top elastic casing, and later fringed the bottom:

I had assumed that tight elastic at the top of this dress would be enough to hold it in place, but on my straight little noodle, it was not. There goes my idea for a Trashion/Refashion Show garment that she can sew herself! I tightened the elastic several times, but finally ended up just instructing her to keep hitching it up. 

We used part of my wire hanger wings tutorial for Tinkerbell's wings--Syd sketched the template, but the wire hangers were too difficult for her to work with, so I bent the wire--but Syd rejected any sort of fabric overlay as being too far of a deviation from her original concept, so Matt did have to buy clear cellophane gift wrap from the Dollar Store and let Syd hot glue that to the wire frame:

Matt also took Syd to a shoe store so that she could ask for (and receive!) two of those cardboard shoe inserts that new shoes come with (it's been ages since I've bought the child new shoes, so who knows how she managed to remember those!), and her plan had been to paint them green, attach pom poms, and somehow adhere them to the tops of her regular shoes, but fortunately she finally decided that her dress and wings and hairstyle were enough--whew!

The child tells me that she wants to be a dress designer and hair stylist and ballerina when she grows up, but if you ask me, she has an affinity for engineering. We often joke that Will's perfect occupation would be the dictator-for-life of a small island nation, so I think Syd would be all set as her Czar of Public Works.

Sad Poem, Happy Poem

It's well-known in our house that I have a beef with American Life in Poetry. It's a newspaper column that appears in our paper on Sundays, and you'd think that with a national readership, Ted Kooser would choose poems that were both accessible to the average person and of a wide variety, so that everyone could discover that they do, indeed, love poetry.

Instead, our family's running joke is that I discover every week that once again, Kooser has chosen the Most Depressing Poem in the World to share with his readership. The joke goes that I read out the title, which often sounds quite happy--"Oh!" I say. "This one is entitled 'Early October Snow!' Doesn't that sound nice!" Then I begin to read the poem, which always does, indeed, start happily. "The poet is painting a lovely picture of a snowfall!" I exclaim contentedly.

But, alas, hints of a deeper darkness begin to emerge: "Hmmm, that imagery of the winter landscape laid out over the colorful autumn is a little sad..." Sometimes, Matt will actually take the paper from me at this point, if I've mentioned a pet or a child in the poem, and pre-read the rest of it. He will then inevitably shake his head in disapproval and recommend that I do not read on. I love a good poem, though, so generally I insist on having the paper back and read through to the end where, of course, I'm given a bleak piece of evidence of our own mortality. The pretty winter landscape superimposed over the autumn season is a metaphor for growing old, you see.

Everything and everyone that we love is going to die, but it doesn't matter, because we're going to die, too.

I swear, we do this every week, practically. Practically every single week!

It's the poems about children and animals, though, that I respond to with genuine upset. This poem, in particular, has become legend in our family, as I still sometimes bring it up--"The dog, Matt! They forgot the dog!!! Why is there such carelessness and cruelty in love?!? Why is everyone so horrible?!?"--but this poem about, sigh, a dead cat, had me sitting at the kitchen table and crying so much about Ballantine that Syd hugged me and promised to write me a happy poem.

And so she did:

It's not exactly a "poem" poem, but it is very happy, don't you think? I'm especially intrigued by the poet's imagery of perfect happiness residing in a place where people have never been. Evocative, yes?

Rice Paddy in a Bucket

Rice is a key component of our Artifacts of Ancient China study. We memorized the approximate beginning of its usage in settled agricultural communities (around 5000 BCE), and then the kids planted a miniature rice paddy in a bucket!

We're going to have to do this project again in the spring or summer to get the full effect, or I'm going to have to buy a grow light, because cool autumn days in the window of our front hallway was not the ideal growing condition for rice; nevertheless, we were able to carry the project along far enough to get a good idea of how growing rice works. Here's what we did:

1. Get a bucket. Buckets make excellent tools and playthings for children, and I pick them up wherever I find them in a good condition at a good price. The one that we used is a small-ish one from Lowe's.

2. Fill it halfway with dirt. We used potting soil for container plants in our rice paddy, and that was a mistake, as it was too light, and it wouldn't sink right when we added the water. It worked, so use it in a pinch, but next time I'm going to buy straight soil or composted manure or something similar instead of "potting soil."

3. Buy rice. We went to our local natural foods co-op and bought simple, organic brown rice from the bulk bin. This would be a fun time to expand the project, perhaps even for a science fair, as the kids discovered several varieties of rice in those bulk bins, and got pretty excited about the possibilities! I wasn't sure if this project would work at all, so I dissuaded them from experimenting, unfortunately, but in the spring/summer (or in science fair season!), I'll encourage them to choose as many varieties as they like, and we'll simply prepare a separate and labeled rice paddy for each.

4. Fill the bucket with water. Ideally, you want the water to be just a couple of inches over the level of the soil, but this didn't really work out with our potting soil, since about half of it floated! Weird. Again, the project still worked, but that soil choice at the beginning is very important.

5. Generously sprinkle in the rice. The bulk bin rice will sprout, but not very prolifically, so sow heavily.

6. Set the rice paddy in a warm spot. Keep an eye on it, and keep the water level high.

7. Observe! It was VERY exciting when the rice grains began to sprout, and even more so when they began to grow in earnest:

How fun is that? It's a real rice paddy! Of course, you can see in the photos that the potting soil is floating, and the rice is growing on top of that, so it never really gets under the water as it's supposed to. For this reason, we also had a mold problem on the surface, but since I knew from the beginning that we probably weren't going to be able to grow full rice plants for food in this chilly hallway, I just ignored it.

When the plants were several inches high, the rice paddy got smelly and stagnant, and so we knew it was time for the project to come to an end. Will didn't want to just dump it out, as I'd suggested, but she did carry it outside to die a natural death during our next hard freeze. 

She also did consent to pull a couple of rice sprouts so that we could look at them:

She's wearing safety goggles because she's on a break from smashing glass bottles with a hammer.

 Even though the project didn't work perfectly, it was a great one for cementing the timeline date, getting a visual of what a rice paddy looks like (in miniature), reviewing botany, and inspiring the kids towards further exploration.

Also, Will now knows that a stagnant rice paddy smells like "farts," so there's that, as well.

Autumn Play

Autumn here in Indiana has been gorgeous this year, and everyone has been outside enjoying it!

And thank goodness, too, because I'm already dreading winter.

Shiver.

Work Plans for the Week of November 3, 2014: Back to Work

The kids had a fabulous time on their vacation to California! Their grandparents took them to museums, and beaches, and tide pools, and LegoLand! In fact, their vacation was so educational (they're full of facts about tar pits now, and King Tut, and model trains), that I feel perfectly justified in giving them the first two days of this week off to unpack and get back into the groove.

I also signed Will up for a Minecraft Homeschool class whose orientation technically started last week, so she'll be having some extra time on the computer to complete her orientation lesson and get used to their map before she starts the class in earnest on Wednesday.

Playdates and classes and volunteer work will get the kids back into the swing of the school schedule, and we'll start our school week on Wednesday.

WEDNESDAY: I actually don't remember where the children have left off in their Math Mammoth curricula (gasp, I know!), so I'll have to get them to show me. It's somewhere in the time telling unit for Syd and the endless division unit for Will, though, so I'm not too lost.

Will is beginning her Minecraft Homeschool class on this day, and I'm not yet sure how much time it will take, so I've given it just the one school slot this week. Syd will be reading a biography of Florence Nightengale, as part of the kids' Girl Scout First Aid badge for both Brownies and Juniors--we're studying first aid through the lens of its professionals, since there are so many interesting people to learn about who work in the areas of medicine and civic safety.

Mostly on this day, though, there will be loads of clubs and classes! The kids are taking a class on wildcraft and medicinal herbs as part of our Girl Scout Co-op, they'll be attending their monthly online Magic Tree House Club meeting, and also attending their monthly LEGO Club meeting--their creations from the club meeting are displayed in the public library children's department all month, and this is thrilling for them.

THURSDAY: I've neglected music for a long, long time, but back when I was teaching it regularly, Syd loved the Hoffman Academy online piano lessons so much that I bought the written work that goes with it, and I'll be using it with both kids.

Song School Spanish will bring more Spanish vocabulary into our lives!

The kids (and I! I don't love ice skating, but I hate sitting on my butt more) have an ice skating date with our homeschool group on this afternoon, and we're also going to attend the dress rehearsal of the play "Pride and Prejudice" on this evening. I'm not sure if they'll actually like the graphic novel version enough to read it through, but I've also got an excellent infographic of the plot that they can look at, just so they know what's going on in the play.

FRIDAY: The AMC 8 problems that I'll be showing the kids today are one that requires a knowledge of mean and median (I'll have to show them that, as well, as they haven't encountered it before), and one that makes clever use of Pascal's triangle. The kids HAVE done Pascal's triangles before, so that one should be easy enough--more time to learn about mean and median!

Another option for math on this day is for the kids to re-enroll in their favorite math class, which is back to a time and day that we can make! I'd forgotten about that when I made these lesson plans, so I suppose I'll just present both options to the kids and see which they'd prefer.

Gee... I wonder?

The kids will also have to show me where we are in First Language Lessons. I was pleased to hear that during their plane ride, playing Mad Libs with the little guy sitting next to them, my kids "taught" him the parts of speech. I imagine that most of this involved a child reciting by rote, in monotone, definitions like "an adverb describes a verb, adjective, or other adverb" with little understanding of what she was saying, but still--it beats not having a definition for adverbs at all!

The kids might be interested in a more extensive unit on endangered and extinct animals, or this might be a one-off, but nevertheless, I know that Will loves origami, so when I came across this little lesson and origami passenger pigeon project, I immediately figured out a way to work it into the schedule.

I've also got the kids writing thank-you notes to the firefighters who led our fire station field trip; I'll ask the kids to include the new information that they learned on the trip, so it'll be a good culmination activity, as well. I've got some photos to print for them, and the kids will bake them some healthy muffins, and then we'll bring it all by to them on the weekend!

SATURDAY: Again, our weekend is ridiculously busy. Syd still has ballet twice on Saturdays--once for her class, and a second hour-long rehearsal for The Nutcracker in the afternoons--and Will is beginning her own two-hour rehearsals on Saturdays this week--she's preparing for an aerial silks performance! After Syd's afternoon rehearsal, we'll be driving up to Battle Ground, Indiana, for an evening program at Wolf Park (howling with the wolves!) and a visit to the battle ground and Prophetstown. I am a MAJOR Tecumseh fangirl, and I am SUPER excited. The kids don't know a ton about Tecumseh--it's just a sad period of history, you know?--but we've got The Story of the World chapters on him to listen to on the way there, and then I'll flesh the story out more for them as we walk around.

Sunday brings chess club for Will, maybe a hike for all of us (we've been working on cleaning up the giant 1960s-era dump at the very back of our woods, sigh), and plenty of time for board games, books, and play.

And probably more howling. I think that Wolf Park program is going to be FUN!

My Latest: Vampires, Zombies, and Elephants

a call to make elegrams

a round-up of wood slice projects (we have a LOT of tree limbs on our property!)

a tutorial for making Will's Moby Wrap vampire hood

and a discussion of zombies, and what it says about us that we like them so much

I hadn't been feeling well for the last couple of days--no energy, no enthusiasm, just sort of slogging through everything that I needed to do each day--and I was worried that I was coming down with a bug, right when the kids were about to come back from California and I'd want to spend all of my time with them.

But then the kids came back, hauling their backpacks down the boarding ramp and beaming, then running to hug me and tell me all about their trip. Apparently, there'd been a THIRD unaccompanied minor on their flight, a six-year-old boy, and all the children had been sat together in the same row, where they played happily and chatted for the entire flight. Syd even told me the partially incoherent story of how a woman sitting behind them told them that she was a teacher and that they behaved really well and "did great nouns!" (Mad Libs, don't you know?).

Anyway, what with all this telling, and admiring their candy stash (trick-or-treating went VERRA well in La Jolla...), and getting them settled into the car, and hearing all their stories, and seeing all their souvenirs, it didn't occur to me until hours later that hey! I felt great!

I hadn't been getting sick those last couple of days without my kids. I'd just been sad.

Eclipse Unseen

When the sunny morning of our fire station field trip turned into the partially cloudy afternoon of the kids' homeschool group's Halloween party and then into the completely overcast late afternoon of the partial solar eclipse, I was so, so bummed.

Hoping for a break in the clouds, the kids and I nevertheless spent the time of the eclipse over at the drive-in, hanging out with blankets, books, and eclipse glasses. That break never came, but fortunately, it's easy to keep oneself entertained at an empty drive-in movie theater:

Ring around the Rosie

Red Light, Green Light

and reading (always)

I'm still researching our upcoming astronomy unit, but I'm really excited about beginning it this winter--the cold air of winter makes the night skies clearer, and the longer nights makes for plenty of time to stargaze before bedtime!

And as far as I'm concerned, it's not too early to start gearing up for our next total solar eclipse in 2017!